Women in Bed

by Jessica Keener

  She didn’t know. She didn’t know.

  In the morning, she stared into the closet at her white cotton robe hanging there. Such a simple thing. It’s hard to figure what’s missing sometimes.

  Other nights she sat up with her knees pulled to her chest as if she hurt. But she felt nothing. She listened to Miles quietly breathing.

  June mornings, the sun shone off the white stove, white tiled floor, white countertops. Until she quit her job, she never knew there were so many hours in a solitary day.

  Mrs. Jackson, her former client, knew. Mrs. Jackson said hours didn’t exist for counting time; they measured events. Every Tuesday when she came to see Cynthia, she wore the same black knit dress, the same grouping of chains around her neck, the same red scarf to hold back her hair. “You’re too young to understand, dear,” she said, fondling her chains.

  Loneliness was in Mrs. Jackson’s shoulders, her throat, the joints in her knees, her sciatica nerve and intestinal tract. Cynthia listened and recommended x-rays, Kaopectate, traction, Prednisone. None of these remedies worked.

  One morning in July, Miles turned to her in the kitchen. He held a mug of coffee in one hand, a croissant in the other. “You’re bored. You’re getting depressed,” he said. “You need a change.”

  She heard what he said but she couldn’t explain it. She developed pains in her chest. Breathing in out in out.

  After the hot sun in August slipped across the kitchen floor, she moved to the couch in the den and sat, legs knotted, studying patterns in the rug. If she could find the answer. The air conditioner chugged in the window behind her. She pulled at the skin on her neck to open her throat for air. What good was breathing? It was hard getting air, like birds flying in her chest, their wings caught in her ribs.

  Were there no true answers to behold in this life?

  Years ago, when Miles was a resident at St. Agnes’, they found each other and discovered that they both grew up in small, rural towns. They both attended state colleges and shared an interest in health care. Miles was an only child, too.

  During one of their coffee breaks, talking over the pink speckled tables in the cafeteria, Miles asked her to marry him. They had a short engagement, a tiny ceremony. His mother, her parents, Miles’ best friend and Cynthia’s aunt attended. Happy? Was she happy?

  She thought so.

  Trudging back upstairs through the hallway of her lovely stucco home, she lay down to consider happiness, pulling their coverlet over her shoulders, she dreamed in the shadow of the pillow, meteorites the size of her fist falling from the sky in a nameless town in a nameless world. People she didn’t know came out of their homes to watch. When the stones broke against the ground, butterflies flew out. She ran and stumbled on a rock shining bright as a prayer at her feet and knelt down to inspect it.

  The sound of a shrill ringing woke her. She reached for the telephone on the night table and heard Moira’s voice.

  “Hi there stranger! Where in the world have you gone?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Are you sick?” she asked. “What’s wrong? You sound funny.”

  “Nothing, why?” Cynthia sat up and cleared her throat.

  “You sound different.”

  Moira insisted on lunch. Five days later, Cynthia stood in front of her bedroom mirror ironing her long skirt with her hands, fixing the collar of her gray silk blouse. She turned and twisted in her new pumps, dissatisfied with her hair, which was short and tucked behind her ears.

  “This is my treat,” Moira said greeting her in the restaurant. Moira had a small waist, full breasts and hips; a model’s flawless complexion. She wore necklines offering up cleavage that Cynthia thought inappropriate at work. But somehow, in a way that Cynthia couldn’t understand, Moira simply got away with it.

  “You will not believe what’s been happening,” Moira said, steering her over to a booth she had already saved for them. “Mrs. Jackson moved in with a man­—don’t even ask­—he’s seventy-eight—and no, they’re not married. She met him at one of the group sessions.”

  “What group sessions?”

  “Your successor has come up with a good idea,” she said, “but let’s order first. I’m starved.”

  The red vinyl-lined seat hissed when Cynthia sat down.

  “It’s all working out, thanks to you,” she added. “I mean, you picked her.”

  Cynthia opened the menu and read down an encyclopedic list of entrees, drinks, desserts, but couldn’t make up her mind.

  “I don’t know what to choose.”

  “Don’t hold back.”

  “Soup,” Cynthia said to the young man waiting for their orders. He looked college-bound, ready to ride all the humps and bumps of life. She handed him the menu.

  “That’s all?” Moira said. “I’ll have the seafood platter and a glass of milk.”

  “I’m glad all is well,” Cynthia said, though something small and dark in her mind had hoped that things might fall apart in her absence. She admonished herself for this evil, untidy thought.

  “Yes, but you’ve lost weight,” Moira said. “Have you been running? What have you been doing? We haven’t heard a peep in months.”

  Cynthia shrugged. “Taking time, I guess.”

  “Well, I have something to tell you. I’m pregnant. Four months already. I’m taking a leave at eight months. Believe me, I’m already counting the days—one hundred and eighteen days left.”

  The college kid returned. He placed a bowl of vegetable soup in front of Cynthia and warned her not to burn her tongue. Then he left again.

  “Go on, silly. Get started,” Moira said.

  “Wonderful news,” Cynthia said, not feeling a thing. That made her feel even stranger, so she picked up her spoon and tried to eat.

  The waiter came back with Moira’s platter.

  “Oooh. Look at this. How’s your soup? All I want to do is chow down all day.” Moira launched into her shrimp.

  “Tell me about those sessions,” Cynthia said, though in truth she wanted to go back home, like an invalid who has fallen in love with her bed.

  “It started with coffee and cake,” Moira said, laughing. “That got everybody to show up.

  “Food’s a wonderful equalizer.” Cynthia heard herself speaking mechanically and hated herself for it.

  “Yep. Sure is.” Moira plowed a forkful of shrimp into her mouth and chewed vigorously. “Each week we have a topic. Last week, ten people showed up and talked about how they felt when they woke up in the morning; what went through their heads. It sounds simplistic. But it’s not really,” she said, swallowing. “The new you—Roxie we call her—digs for details. A person can’t just say, ‘lousy’ or ‘depressed’. Roxie tells them to go back to a specific moment of waking and describe smells, sounds, feelings. You should hear how they talk.”

  She stopped to wipe her fingers. “Now we’re planning a field trip. Bird watching. You should come. Mrs. Jackson is always asking about you. We all wonder what you’ve been doing and why you haven’t called. It’s like you disappeared. You probably want to forget St. Agnes’ existence …”

  On the ride back Cynthia thought how she had never desired children, and luckily, neither had Miles. But such a decision put her outside the ring of normal. People questioned it. Others assumed she had tried and failed and when they learned she hadn’t even tried, they secretly suspected that she had some aberrant, twisted reason for not choosing that path.

  It’s worth it, a parent will say. Of course her parents were disappointed. But, in her opinion, too many so-called parents in this world had no clue about how to nurture, and were never called to task for the mistreatment of their children. In Cynthia’s case, she was simply ignored.

  As a child, she took care of her father, who was on disability most of his adult working life. He was asthmatic and overweight. He had an in
jured back. Mother worked for an insurance company. When her mother retired, her parents moved away to a retirement community in North Carolina. Cynthia rarely saw them.

  After her lunch with Moira, she realized that it was time to do something. She called the director of Open Arms, a hospice program in western Massachusetts that she knew about, and expressed an interest in volunteering there.

  “I don’t know Cynthia,” Miles said to her the morning of the appointment. He shook his head. “You’ll end up in the same rut. Do something for yourself.”

  “I am. This is it.” She had a stubborn streak and there was nothing he could say that would change her mind at this point. She got in the car and drove a good hour’s ride to Berkshire Valley Open Arms.

  The hospital was brand new, a tinted-glass encased rectangle that jutted out of a dip in the land like a dark, shiny rock. White cumulus clouds reflected off the façade. The sight reminded her of her dream and convinced her it was her fate to be here.

  Inside, the director, a petite, blond woman named Kate, met her at the front desk. Kate moved slowly, patiently guiding Cynthia around corners and smiling when Cynthia thanked her for holding open the door. Everyone seemed to glide around this place. Sounds sunk back into low-lit places.

  As soon as Cynthia sat down in Kate’s office, Kate’s phone rang.

  Once again, someone was desperate. Cynthia crossed her legs and waited a long time for Kate to end the conversation. But Kate exhibited the same slow, methodical manner of speaking as she did leading Cynthia through the hallway maze. Kate kept nodding and saying, I know, I know, I’m so sorry—

  Little dark thoughts began to pinch at her brain again. Cynthia began to feel Kate’s consideration for the person on the phone was bordering on rudeness toward her who had, after all, come all this way to talk at this specific time. Kate finally hung up.

  “Tell me. Why are you here?”

  Why? Cynthia told her about her long, invaluable service at St. Agnes’. She talked about health care. She told Kate she missed working with people who needed her. But that was a lie. Wasn’t it? Did Kate know this? She saw the director staring at her, watching intently. Did she know?

  “It’s rewarding yes,” Kate said, who went on to say that there were all kinds of rewarding work. She said many people left before the training period ended. “Working with people who are dying is difficult,” she said. “It’s a terrible strain.”

  “Working with the elderly wasn’t easy,” Cynthia reminded her. Here she was trying to tell Kate something and somehow not getting through.

  “We have young adults here, too. Dying comes in every form and color.”

  “I’d like to try.”

  “Yes. It’s all we can do.” She leaned forward and touched Cynthia’s arm. “Will you join me for lunch?”

  The cafeteria was walled in glass and looked like a restaurant with booths and round tables and plants. There were stations for salads and homemade soups. Thinking of Moira, she chose the seafood salad. Kate stirred her clam chowder, dipping the spoon in the milky paste, stirring round and round as she talked. She told Cynthia that her husband died of a rare nerve disorder. “Upstairs in this place,” she said, raising her eyes. “And here I am. Five years later. I find it comforting. What about you? Who have you lost?”

  Lost?

  “No one.” She felt stupid and exposed, as if she had just confessed a major failure in her life. “Well, no one besides a grandparent,” she added. “My grandmother died of a stroke. She was eighty-nine.”

  Kate stopped her stirring and looked at her. How old was she when her grandmother died? Did she cry? Did Cynthia feel ‘right’ about it? What were her feelings at the time?

  Feelings? Right?

  No. she hadn’t cried, Cynthia told her.

  “I saw the distress it caused my mother. My mother and grandmother had been very close. I was in college at the time. But my grandmother lived far away in Florida, where she had moved eight years before. I didn’t know her very well. It was my mother who needed the comfort.”

  Kate nodded and smiled oddly. “Ah, I see you were the caretaking child.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  For three weeks after that, Cynthia handed out magazines and made herself available to anyone who needed to talk.

  “Who are you helping?” Miles asked after they settled in at a table in a small, French bistro that had opened up in their suburb. They had just seen a movie about missing children in Argentina. “I thought you wanted to take some courses. What about those Spanish lessons you talked about?” The waiter had taken their orders and was filling their glasses with red wine.

  “They need me.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “I like it,” she said, evading his point. “I’m there for them.”

  The September night was mild. After a dinner of fish smothered in lentils, they strolled along the back streets. Newton was a family town, a child-centered town filled with doctors and lawyers and overzealous democrats. They walked by a family of five laughing loudly, slurping on ice cream cones.

  “You need them more than they need you,” he said, bringing up the subject again.

  At forty-nine years old, her husband had a flat, sturdy brow and strong hands. Miles’ hair was thinning, even starting to gray. Strange how it comes to us, this slow dying, Cynthia thought.

  “What do you mean by that?” she stopped and turned toward him.

  “It takes you away from yourself; their pain takes over.”

  “No. It brings me closer. Death tells me who I am.”

  “How does it do that?”

  “It’s like a mirror. It forces you to look at yourself, strip away the lies.”

  “Life can do that too.”

  “I don’t see how,” she said.

  “I know. That’s my point. Well, I don’t want to argue about it,” he said, turning in the direction of their parked car.

  She didn’t either. That was not something they did.

  At Open Arms, Cynthia met Brooke, who was forty-one and married like Cynthia. Brooke spent four years on fertility drugs to produce a child. Now she anguished over whether those same drugs had caused her breast cancer.

  “You bore a beautiful child,” Cynthia said on one of her afternoon visits. Greeting cards papered the wall above Brooke’s bed and on her bedside table: photos of her husband, a lean, wide-shouldered man, and many snapshots of her red-cheeked, toddler.

  Brooke lay on her bed with eyes closed, apparently sleeping. The anti-cancer drugs had pummeled her organs, causing a kidney shut down. When a tumor showed up in her lungs, Brooke came to Open Arms. Her bald head was smooth as a bird’s egg, her wrists stripped down to the bone.

  “Brooke. How are you today?” Cynthia asked, sitting in a chair beside her. She thought she’d heard Brooke whisper something and stop. Cynthia leaned closer to listen. The other day, she thought Brooke had stopped breathing, and then her breast sunk in and she gasped another breath. Cynthia waited for her to breathe again.

  “I’m here, Brooke. What is it?”

  She thought she heard a gurgling sound in Brooke’s throat. A dribble of saliva sputtered. She couldn’t remember how long it was before another volunteer walked in and ushered Cynthia out.

  Kate handed her a glass of water and sat beside her in her office.

  “It’s your first time. Don’t suppress it,” she said. “Why don’t you go home now. Take care of you.”

  Cynthia wandered outside to the crowded parking lot dazed by this swift ending to Brooke’s life. When she got home, she walked into the kitchen, slid down the refrigerator door and sat on the floor. It grew dark. She heard Miles’ car settle into the garage, then silence, and his steps up the back stairs.

  “What are you doing on the floor?” he asked. “You need a break from this.” He bent dow
n next to her. She smelled his weakened cologne, a limey odor coming from his neck.

  “I’m not important.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  He slipped down to the floor beside her and held her hand, watching her closely.

  “No. Never mind. Don’t bother with me,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? You’re upset.” He took her other hand.

  “I’m just so sad.” So sad.

  “I know you are. Allow yourself to feel it. It’s good for your heart.”

  “What? How will that help?” Help! “I’ve ruined everything.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “No job. I have nothing. No life.” Something inside her began riding down a current. It rocked her side to side, jarring her brain, her breath clawing its way out of some insidious womb expanding inside her. She leaned against him.

  “You have you.” He spoke gently, cradling her shoulders. “And me. Cynthia, please. Let your guard down. Let me in.”

  “How?” How? She heard Mrs. Jackson: you don’t count time in years, dear, you count events; that’s how it is. You know, if only she could mark this event, sliding down his torso, curling now onto the floor, the cool floor so smooth upon her cheek and bone, her chin catching a piece of grit not swept up, like gristle, like sand, like golden flecks dazzling her mind across this linoleum floor, circling, spinning, becoming swirls of cold sparks spinning against stone, she would crawl into it. “Oh my god.” God. God. She would crawl into it. Take me. Please dear God. She heaved another breath, scrabbling toward somewhere without gravity; it had to exist, that heavenly place —

  Recovery

  I saw the hands on the clock some time ago—two sticks bobbing past my canoe. For on that strange lake I forgot minutes and directions and fixed my eyes on the objects that surrounded me: bedpan, thermometer, blanket, TV. During that week, I clung to those things as part of who I was while countless nurses, doctors and aides stood by me to monitor my pulse.

  By the second day I had grown used to the damp feeling in my limbs. Plastic tubing, inserted in my leg and connected to a bottle outside my room, drew liquid into my bloodstream. I felt the chill of it in my bones and curled up to stop my knees from shaking. I waited for the bad weather to go away. Beside me the phone was still. I had asked my friends not to call. Their voices had no meaning for me then. I waited. My canoe spun in its course and moved on.